nevbar

Monday, March 25, 2013

Our
floors are here! They have been "acclimating" for the past few days. I
use quotations because I don't know what they're actually doing. All I
know is that hardwood acclimation has to do with moisture levels, and if
you don't let them acclimate for at least 2 days or 3 days or 90 days
depending on what website you check, your floors will explode and your
husband will never let you get hardwood again. So right now, we're
waiting.

As I mentioned here, we have big ol' plans for this hardwood. We are going to be laying it in a herringbone pattern, and just about everyone has
made sure to tell us that it would be easier to lay them straight. I argue that it would have been even easier to not rip out our perfectly fine ceramic tile in the first place. But we did that, so here we are.

Just
in case the process of laying herringbone flooring didn't seem daunting
enough, we've also decided to stain the floors in three different
colors. We'll be doing a light, medium and dark stain, mixed up
throughout the flooring. My goal is for it to look like this:

but
since we have no experience with laying flooring of any kind, let alone
complicated patterned hardwood, I'm open to the idea that this all may
not work.

We'll be starting the whole process on Friday, and I will definitely keep everyone updated!

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

It's a
silly story. We were moving along so well in our kitchen. We had almost
everything finished (with the exception of finishing details). We knew
we wanted to replace our floors, but were holding off until the Summer
to get it done. We were able to live with our ceramic tile - it wasn't
pretty, but it wasn't offensive either.

Then,
a couple of weeks ago, while sitting at my desk at work, I had a
brainstorm. What if there's HARDWOOD under our kitchen tile?! It could
be possible, right?

So I rushed home and checked underneath the heating vent. This is what I saw:

I just about lost my mind. Hardwood!! Hidden under our tile flooring!! This was a must investigate.
Even though I hadn't wanted to change our floors right then, I couldn't
resist the hardwood. I told Joel, and he reluctantly agreed that we
could check it out soon.

A couple of days later, I came home and found this:

It seemed that Joel couldn't resist the lure of the hardwood either.

Since
we hadn't planned on ripping out the floors, Joel just used a hammer
and a pry bar that first day. It took forever for him to get the tile
off but seeing the progress kept our little hearts going.

My job was to find the screws in the subflooring and remove them. Each time we removed the plywood and found hardwood, I wanted to squeal.

Some
patches were unstained. We started to piece together that there had
been a wall closing off this part of our kitchen, and that there was
some kind of china cabinet or something here.

We weren't concerned thought - we were happy to stain them again. You can see where the wall used to be below.

By
the next day, Joel had a much better system going - he borrowed a
hammer drill and was able to knock the tiles out so much faster. It was
wonderful.

We
removed all of the tile and subflooring in our eating area, and were
just amazed by the beautiful hardwood we found underneath.

But it was around this time that things turned... questionable.

For
this to make sense, I'll start with a diagram. Keep in mind I made this
in about 2 minutes, and it's not even remotely to scale!

What
was the problem? Well, we found a spot where the hardwood abruptly
stopped, and instead of any flooring, we found what used to be a wall.

All of a sudden, it occurred to me what was going on - our kitchen
had likely been two separate rooms at one point, a small kitchen, and a
formal dining room.

I freaked. It was SO likely that
only the dining room would be covered in hardwood. Who knew what we
would find once we moved over the threshold and reached the old kitchen?

We eagerly cut away the tile, making a space big enough to remove a piece of plywood.

And
at that, it was time for the moment of truth... removing the plywood
that lay over the old dining room and the old kitchen. And we found...

Awful, awful laminate tile.

I was so disappointed. On one side, we're looking at this:

And
on the other side... this. (Don't mind the mess - we were in the midst
of floor removal here so our kitchen table was in the dining room and
our kitchen was upsidedown.)

Our dog even came to show her dismay.

So, what now?

We have a few options:

Live with the floors as they are

Recover the tile with hardwood and try our best to match it

Go with something completely new

After
lots of talking about it, we've come to the conclusion that we will do
something completely new. I had fallen in love with hardwood floors in
the kitchen, so we aren't going to stray too far from that. But we will
be doing something...different. Something that's going to involve an
incredible amount of effort and cutting... but that will hopefully be
AMAZING!!

Sunday, March 10, 2013

This post is lonnnng overdue. About two weeks ago, we finally installed our kitchen backsplash.

I
won't get into the nitty gritty of it, because installing a backsplash
is fairly straightforward (especially if you buy your backsplash in
sheets.) We bought our hexagonal tiles from amazon, which I was a bit worried about doing, but they arrived in great condition!

It took us about 4 hours to install the tile. Joel used a tile nipper to cut the tile to fit around outlets, windows, etc.

Here's the tile up close - I love the little hexagons!

We did the grout about a week later, which was another fairly simple job, taking about an hour and a half. It made a huge
difference in the look, but unfortunately, I don't have pictures post
grout. Why can't I just go take some now? Well, we started ripping up
the floors (not really planned - more about that when I make the floor
post!) and now our kitchen is a huge, very dusty mess.